Abstract

A comprehensive treatment of Rayleigh-Schrödinger perturbation theory for the symmetric matrix eigenvalue problem is furnished with emphasis on the degenerate problem. The treatment is simply based upon the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse thus distinguishing it from alternative approaches in the literature. In addition to providing a concise matrix-theoretic formulation of this procedure, it also provides for the explicit determination of that stage of the algorithm where each higher-order eigenvector correction becomes fully determined. The theory is built up gradually with each successive stage appended with an illustrative example.